Representative Government, by John Stuart Mill

Chapter 16

Of Nationality, as connected with Representative Government.

A PORTION of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by
common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others — which make them co-operate with each other more
willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by
themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various
causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion,
greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political
antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and
humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past. None of these circumstances, however,
are either indispensable, or necessarily sufficient by themselves. Switzerland has a strong sentiment of nationality,
though the cantons are of different races, different languages, and different religions. Sicily has, throughout
history, felt itself quite distinct in nationality from Naples, notwithstanding identity of religion, almost identity
of language, and a considerable amount of common historical antecedents. The Flemish and the Walloon provinces of
Belgium, notwithstanding diversity of race and language, have a much greater feeling of common nationality than the
former have with Holland, or the latter with France. Yet in general the national feeling is proportionally weakened by
the failure of any of the causes which contribute to it. Identity of language, literature, and, to some extent, of race
and recollections, have maintained the feeling of nationality in considerable strength among the different portions of
the German name, though they have at no time been really united under the same government; but the feeling has never
reached to making the separate states desire to get rid of their autonomy. Among Italians an identity far from
complete, of language and literature, combined with a geographical position which separates them by a distinct line
from other countries, and, perhaps more than everything else, the possession of a common name, which makes them all
glory in the past achievements in arts, arms, politics, religious primacy, science, and literature, of any who share
the same designation, give rise to an amount of national feeling in the population which, though still imperfect, has
been sufficient to produce the great events now passing before us, notwithstanding a great mixture of races, and
although they have never, in either ancient or modern history, been under the same government, except while that
government extended or was extending itself over the greater part of the known world.

Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of
the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the
question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should
be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate
themselves.

But, when a people are ripe for free institutions, there is a still more vital consideration. Free institutions are
next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially
if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative
government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different
sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of
another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions,
or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government,
affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common
arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one
of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy.
Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength
of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding
for the favour of the government against the rest. Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last resort
against the despotism of the government is in that case wanting: the sympathy of the army with the people. The military
are the part of every community in whom, from the nature of the case, the distinction between their fellow-countrymen
and foreigners is the deepest and strongest. To the rest of the people foreigners are merely strangers; to the soldier,
they are men against whom he may be called, at a week's notice, to fight for life or death. The difference to him is
that between friends and foes — we may almost say between fellow-men and another kind of animals: for as respects the
enemy, the only law is that of force, and the only mitigation the same as in the case of other animals — that of simple
humanity. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three-fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners will
have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more desire to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the
same thing against declared enemies. An army composed of various nationalities has no other patriotism than devotion to
the flag. Such armies have been the executioners of liberty through the whole duration of modern history. The sole bond
which holds them together is their officers and the government which they serve; and their only idea, if they have any,
of public duty is obedience to orders. A government thus supported, by keeping its Hungarian regiments in Italy and its
Italian in Hungary, can long continue to rule in both places with the iron rod of foreign conquerors.

If it be said that so broadly marked a distinction between what is due to a fellow-countryman and what is due merely
to a human creature is more worthy of savages than of civilised beings, and ought, with the utmost energy, to be
contended against, no one holds that opinion more strongly than myself. But this object, one of the worthiest to which
human endeavour can be directed, can never, in the present state of civilisation, be promoted by keeping different
nationalities of anything like equivalent strength under the same government. In a barbarous state of society the case
is sometimes different. The government may then be interested in softening the antipathies of the races that peace may
be preserved and the country more easily governed. But when there are either free institutions or a desire for them, in
any of the peoples artificially tied together, the interest of the government lies in an exactly opposite direction. It
is then interested in keeping up and envenoming their antipathies that they may be prevented from coalescing, and it
may be enabled to use some of them as tools for the enslavement of others. The Austrian Court has now for a whole
generation made these tactics its principal means of government; with what fatal success, at the time of the Vienna
insurrection and the Hungarian contest, the world knows too well. Happily there are now signs that improvement is too
far advanced to permit this policy to be any longer successful.

For the preceding reasons, it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of
governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities. But several considerations are liable to conflict
in practice with this general principle. In the first place, its application is often precluded by geographical
hindrances. There are parts even of Europe in which different nationalities are so locally intermingled that it is not
practicable for them to be under separate governments. The population of Hungary is composed of Magyars, Slovaks,
Croats, Serbs, Roumans, and in some districts Germans, so mixed up as to be incapable of local separation; and there is
no course open to them but to make a virtue of necessity, and reconcile themselves to living together under equal
rights and laws. Their community of servitude, which dates only from the destruction of Hungarian independence in 1849,
seems to be ripening and disposing them for such an equal union. The German colony of East Prussia is cut off from
Germany by part of the ancient Poland, and being too weak to maintain separate independence, must, if geographical
continuity is to be maintained, be either under a non-German government, or the intervening Polish territory must be
under a German one. Another considerable region in which the dominant element of the population is German, the
provinces of Courland, Esthonia, and Livonia, is condemned by its local situation to form part of a Slavonian state. In
Eastern Germany itself there is a large Slavonic population: Bohemia is principally Slavonic, Silesia and other
districts partially so. The most united country in Europe, France, is far from being homogeneous: independently of the
fragments of foreign nationalities at its remote extremities, it consists, as language and history prove, of two
portions, one occupied almost exclusively by a Gallo-Roman population, while in the other the Frankish, Burgundian, and
other Teutonic races form a considerable ingredient.

When proper allowance has been made for geographical exigencies, another more purely moral and social consideration
offers itself. Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when
it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage.
Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the
current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people — to be a member of the French
nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French
protection, and the dignity and prestige of French power — than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past
times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the
world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.

Whatever really tends to the admixture of nationalities, and the blending of their attributes and peculiarities in a
common union, is a benefit to the human race. Not by extinguishing types, of which, in these cases, sufficient examples
are sure to remain, but by softening their extreme forms, and filling up the intervals between them. The united people,
like a crossed breed of animals (but in a still greater degree, because the influences in operation are moral as well
as physical), inherits the special aptitudes and excellences of all its progenitors, protected by the admixture from
being exaggerated into the neighbouring vices. But to render this admixture possible, there must be peculiar
conditions. The combinations of circumstances which occur, and which effect the result, are various.

The nationalities brought together under the same government may be about equal in numbers and strength, or they may
be very unequal. If unequal, the least numerous of the two may either be the superior in civilisation, or the inferior.
Supposing it to be superior, it may either, through that superiority, be able to acquire ascendancy over the other, or
it may be overcome by brute strength and reduced to subjection. This last is a sheer mischief to the human race, and
one which civilised humanity with one accord should rise in arms to prevent. The absorption of Greece by Macedonia was
one of the greatest misfortunes which ever happened to the world: that of any of the principal countries of Europe by
Russia would be a similar one.

If the smaller nationality, supposed to be the more advanced in improvement, is able to overcome the greater, as the
Macedonians, reinforced by the Greeks, did Asia, and the English India, there is often a gain to civilisation: but the
conquerors and the conquered cannot in this case live together under the same free institutions. The absorption of the
conquerors in the less advanced people would be an evil: these, must be governed as subjects, and the state of things
is either a benefit or a misfortune, according as the subjugated people have or have not reached the state in which it
is an injury not to be under a free government, and according as the conquerors do or do not use their superiority in a
manner calculated to fit the conquered for a higher stage of improvement. This topic will be particularly treated of in
a subsequent chapter.

When the nationality which succeeds in overpowering the other is both the most numerous and the most improved; and
especially if the subdued nationality is small, and has no hope of reasserting its independence; then, if it is
governed with any tolerable justice, and if the members of the more powerful nationality are not made odious by being
invested with exclusive privileges, the smaller nationality is gradually reconciled to its position, and becomes
amalgamated with the larger. No Bas-Breton, nor even any Alsatian, has the smallest wish at the present day to be
separated from France. If all Irishmen have not yet arrived at the same disposition towards England, it is partly
because they are sufficiently numerous to be capable of constituting a respectable nationality by themselves; but
principally because, until of late years, they had been so atrociously governed, that all their best feelings combined
with their bad ones in rousing bitter resentment against the Saxon rule. This disgrace to England, and calamity to the
whole empire, has, it may be truly said, completely ceased for nearly a generation. No Irishman is now less free than
an Anglo-Saxon, nor has a less share of every benefit either to his country or to his individual fortunes than if he
were sprung from any other portion of the British dominions. The only remaining real grievance of Ireland, that of the
State Church, is one which half, or nearly half, the people of the larger island have in common with them. There is now
next to nothing, except the memory of the past, and the difference in the predominant religion, to keep apart two
races, perhaps the most fitted of any two in the world to be the completing counterpart of one another. The
consciousness of being at last treated not only with equal justice but with equal consideration is making such rapid
way in the Irish nation as to be wearing off all feelings that could make them insensible to the benefits which the
less numerous and less wealthy people must necessarily derive from being fellow-citizens instead of foreigners to those
who are not only their nearest neighbours, but the wealthiest, and one of the freest, as well as most civilised and
powerful, nations of the earth.

The cases in which the greatest practical obstacles exist to the blending of nationalities are when the
nationalities which have been bound together are nearly equal in numbers and in the other elements of power. In such
cases, each, confiding in its strength, and feeling itself capable of maintaining an equal struggle with any of the
others, is unwilling to be merged in it: each cultivates with party obstinacy its distinctive peculiarities; obsolete
customs, and even declining languages, are revived to deepen the separation; each deems itself tyrannised over if any
authority is exercised within itself by functionaries of a rival race; and whatever is given to one of the conflicting
nationalities is considered to be taken from all the rest. When nations, thus divided, are under a despotic government
which is a stranger to all of them, or which, though sprung from one, yet feeling greater interest in its own power
than in any sympathies of nationality, assigns no privilege to either nation, and chooses its instruments indifferently
from all; in the course of a few generations, identity of situation often produces harmony of feeling, and the
different races come to feel towards each other as fellow-countrymen; particularly if they are dispersed over the same
tract of country. But if the era of aspiration to free government arrives before this fusion has been effected, the
opportunity has gone by for effecting it. From that time, if the unreconciled nationalities are geographically
separate, and especially if their local position is such that there is no natural fitness or convenience in their being
under the same government (as in the case of an Italian province under a French or German yoke), there is not only an
obvious propriety, but, if either freedom or concord is cared for, a necessity, for breaking the connection altogether.
There may be cases in which the provinces, after separation, might usefully remain united by a federal tie: but it
generally happens that if they are willing to forego complete independence, and become members of a federation, each of
them has other neighbours with whom it would prefer to connect itself, having more sympathies in common, if not also
greater community of interest.